LITMIR.BIZ

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you saw the ads I draw for Dunleavy’s. That actually pays a little.”

      “I suppose that’s enough, then.”

      She glared at him, then sighed. “Yes, Colt, it’s enough. I didn’t go out and set the world on fire like you did, but it’s fine. I have a good life. And my painting may be more of a hobby than a profession, but it’s still mine.” She closed her eyes for a second, then shook her head and looked at him again. “Nothing works out the way you think it’s going to when you’re eighteen, Colt. At least, it hasn’t for me. But that’s okay. You know, when I think about it, not one thing has changed since that night in your pickup, and yet everything has changed. I’m a different person now, even though I’m still the smart girl who helps everybody with their algebra homework. I just get paid for it now. My life hasn’t changed that much on the surface. I’m still in Aloma, still in the same house, still a—”

      She broke off with a sharp intake of breath. She clamped her mouth shut and looked at him with wide eyes, her cheeks flushing. He thought for a second she was choking, but she’d just gone very, very still.

      And in that moment the thought followed itself through in his head. He dropped his fork to his plate and gaped at her.

      “Becca, don’t tell me you’re still a virgin?”

      Chapter 3

      He shouldn’t have laughed, he decided later. He was justified in being surprised, even shocked. She’d just admitted to being a thirty-year-old virgin, for Pete’s sake. Surprise was to be expected.

      But really, he should not have laughed.

      The clock on the wall behind him had ticked loudly in the silence that had echoed his question. She’d sat, her face flushed, and stared back at him. As soon as it dawned on him what she’d just said, or had tried not to say, he felt a grin start to build like he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.

      Becca Danvers, with her sweet kisses and carefully banked desires, was still untouched.

      The thought had filled him with so much pleasure, in fact, that he laughed. Out loud.

      He wasn’t laughing now.

      Now he was trying unsuccessfully to stop the scene of the previous night from replaying itself in his head. Now he was working like a demon, hauling off old furniture and ripping rotten carpet from the floor of Doff’s house, in the hopes that hard work would erase the memory of Becca, her face a mask of complete humiliation, from his mind.

      It wasn’t working.

      Colt stood and rubbed at his aching back, surveying the damage he’d done to the house today, and thinking about the damage he’d done to Becca last night.

      Many times over the years he’d imagined what it would have been like if he hadn’t turned Becca down when she offered him her virginity. Imagined it in vivid, Technicolor detail. But he’d assumed, of course, that someone else had eventually taken what he’d declined.

      “Stop looking at me like I’m some kind of freak,” she’d said as she stabbed her fork in her omelette.

      He couldn’t help himself, though. The only coherent words he’d been able to form, after he regained his voice, were, “How the hell did that happen?”

      “It’s actually a matter of something not happening, Colt.”

      She’d sniffed and swallowed, and he felt like a jerk. But still, the thought kept running through his head that no one had touched her. No other man had touched her. And the urge to laugh again welled dangerously close to the surface.

      It was a wonder she hadn’t tossed him out on his butt. But then, that was Becca. Even when she was humiliated—or thought she was—she maintained that cool pride. It might have hurt to think he was laughing at her, but she’d manage to get over it quickly enough.

      Even so, the memory felt sour in his stomach today. “Are the guys around here nuts?” he asked the empty room. He got a rumble in response, and noticed for the first time that the light outside had grown dim. He crossed the room and looked out the window; storm clouds were building in the west.

      “Damn it.” He rubbed the small of his back and contemplated his options. He’d decided to tear out the old carpet—it was filthy and had probably been butt-ugly even when it was new—and refinish the wood floors underneath rather than replace it. The gleam of polished wood would help sell the house, but it was hell on his back.

      It was a habit now to curse Doff when the pain in his back got bad. The pain was going to force him to call it quits for the day. His career was hanging by a thread as it was; he wasn’t going to jeopardize his recovery—and his chance to beat Doff—for the old man’s mess.

      The thing was, he was loath to stay in the house one second more than necessary. He ate his meals, and even slept, on the back porch. With the rain coming, he wouldn’t be able to hang out there. And he sure as hell wasn’t staying in Doff’s house.

      He didn’t realize he’d focused on the hole in the living room wall until he’d stared at it for several minutes. He’d put that hole there a dozen years ago. The last time he’d been in this house. The last time he’d seen Doff.

      He reached for a cigarette, cursed again when he remembered he’d quit two months ago, and walked slowly into the kitchen. Out of spite—whether to himself or to Doff he didn’t know—he turned back to the living room and stared again at the hole in the wall.

      Doff had been three-quarters of his way into a bender the day Colt walked home from a two-day stint in the county jail—another pleasant memory for his mental scrapbook, courtesy of Doff Bonner. The old man had been happy to gloat over Colt’s time behind the bars, had thought it was a good way to teach him a lesson. He’d been too drunk and giddy to coherently say exactly what lesson Colt was supposed to learn from going to jail over something that was Doff’s fault.

      But Colt felt that he had, indeed, learned his lesson. If he was old enough to go to jail, he was old enough to stand up to Doff.

      Maybe he shouldn’t have egged Doff on, Colt had thought since then. Maybe he should just have told the old fart to shut up, and kept walking. But something in him wanted revenge. So he stood up to him. Told the old man how being in jail was a damn sight more fun than being in the rat hole they lived in. How his friends had come up to the jail and played cards with him. How the sheriff’s wife—Toby’s mother, back then—had taken pity on him and baked more food than he could possibly eat.

      That hadn’t been enough to coax more than a little frustration out of Doff, though. Colt found that once the hateful flow of words started, he couldn’t stop them. Or maybe he could have, but it made him feel powerful to be the one hurling the abuse for a change.

      So he kept it up. Told the old man all the things he’d wanted to say for eighteen years. Told Doff what a sorry bum he’d always been, how Colt hated him and was ashamed of him. Still it wasn’t enough to make Doff unleash that fury that was usually so close to the surface.

      So Colt pulled out the one weapon he knew he had.

      “You’re a joke, and always have been. World Champion bull rider, my foot. You cheated. Everyone knows you bought the vote. Even today you’re the biggest joke on the circuit.”

      That had done it. As soon as Colt saw Doff’s fist coming at him, he knew that was what he’d been pushing for. And he swung back.

      He should have known what would happen. He outweighed the old man by a good forty pounds, and all of it muscle. And he had eighteen years of being on the receiving end of the punch. He had plenty stored up to unleash.

      Doff crashed into the wall, so hard he knocked a hole in it. He’d slumped to the floor, his hands up in defense instead of attack, and looked up at Colt, fear in his eyes.

      That was the last time Colt had seen his father. The shame had grabbed him by the throat in that moment and had not let go. He hated Doff Bonner for making

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